WebProNews » Visualhttp://www.webpronews.com
Breaking News in Tech, Search, Social, & BusinessTue, 03 Mar 2015 22:49:41 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.8.1PacSun Shirts Spark Debate: Are They Inappropriate?http://www.webpronews.com/pacsun-shirts-spark-debate-are-they-inappropriate-2014-02
http://www.webpronews.com/pacsun-shirts-spark-debate-are-they-inappropriate-2014-02#commentsWed, 19 Feb 2014 21:48:32 +0000http://www.webpronews.com/?p=322400The mother who bought the entire stock of “indecent” shirts from a PacSun in a Utah mall has caused quite a stir. The media frenzy that she wanted in order to bring attention to her cause hasn’t disappointed.

Judy Cox complained to the manager, but was told the shirts couldn’t be removed without corporate approval.

However, the manager told Mrs. Cox that she had refused to put up the banner that came in the shipment of shirts because it was even worse.

She told Mrs. Cox that she didn’t really want to put the shirts out either, but was following corporate orders.

“These shirts clearly cross a boundary that is continually being pushed on our children in images on the Internet, television and when our families shop in the mall,” Cox said in an email to The Associated Press.

PacSun CEO Gary Schoenfeld doesn’t see what the big deal is. He said that the company takes great pride in the designs that they feature on the shirts and other products displayed in their stores.

“While customer feedback is important to us, we remain committed to the selection of brands and apparel available in our stores,” Schoenfeld said in an emailed statement.

Judy Cox has been through the store manager, the mall manager, and the city attorney. The city attorney referred her to local police, who will decide if it is a matter for the the city attorney to look at. She has even contacted activist groups One Million Moms and Moms for Decency.

City code prohibits store owners from putting “explicit sexual material” on display where they can be seen by the general public. The city defines that as “any material that appeals to a prurient interest in sex and depicts nudity, actual or simulated sexual conduct, sexual excitement, or sadomasochistic abuse.”

Time will tell if the shirts will be deemed unworthy for public display. In the meantime, Judy Cox and her supporters will keep fighting.

“I hope my efforts will inspire others to speak up within their communities,” Cox said in an email. “You don’t have to purchase $600 worth of T-shirts, but you can express your concerns to businesses and corporations who promote the display of pornography to children.”

]]>http://www.webpronews.com/pacsun-shirts-spark-debate-are-they-inappropriate-2014-02/feed0Reuters Eyes Viewdle For Facial Searchhttp://www.webpronews.com/reuters-eyes-viewdle-for-facial-search-2007-09
http://www.webpronews.com/reuters-eyes-viewdle-for-facial-search-2007-09#commentsMon, 17 Sep 2007 23:18:38 +0000http://www.webpronews.com/?p=40474Reuters Labs will use Viewdle’s facial recognition search features to help index video content delivered over certain Reuters satellite streams.
Lots of interesting announcements have emerged from the TechCrunch 40 conference. One company disclosed a significant endorsement of its technology during the event.

Viewdle announced its Reuters deal, where the company’s technology will allow viewers to leap to precise moments of a person’s appearance in a Reuters video.

A demo of how Viewdle handles search for a handful of celebrities and politicians at Reuters said they have over 600 hours of video indexed. It isn’t a comprehensive repository of video yet, but the results for those who have been indexed works well.

Viewdle said its engine employs “a video indexing and reference system that fuses pioneering, facial-recognition visual analysis technology along with other leading search techniques to automatically look inside video streams, frame-by-frame, to recognize and index appearances of people on-screen.”

We think there’s more work to be done on Viewdle, just by looking at a couple of searches through the Reuters Viewdle site. A query for Tom Cruise brings up one video for the superstar, posing for photographers with Katie Holmes. Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher appeared on screen after that, but doing a separate search for Moore returned no results.

]]>http://www.webpronews.com/reuters-eyes-viewdle-for-facial-search-2007-09/feed0The SEO Playbook (Welcome to the Rabbit Hole)http://www.webpronews.com/the-seo-playbook-welcome-to-the-rabbit-hole-2007-04
http://www.webpronews.com/the-seo-playbook-welcome-to-the-rabbit-hole-2007-04#commentsThu, 19 Apr 2007 19:55:51 +0000http://www.webpronews.com/?p=37118SEO is about more than meta tags, title tags, and targeted anchor text. Call it "competitive webmastering", "SEO", or any one of a slew of other titles - it is the thought process of lateral thinking and understanding of website creation and marketing combined that matters most.
]]>SEO is about more than meta tags, title tags, and targeted anchor text. Call it "competitive webmastering", "SEO", or any one of a slew of other titles – it is the thought process of lateral thinking and understanding of website creation and marketing combined that matters most.

It is a line of thinking that necessitates doing what is optimal: when to balance user experience with "bot experience" to create a site that will harvest any legitimate traffic without detriment to conversions, or without venturing into areas beyond the given risk threshhold for the project.

Technology and marketing were formerly unique disciplines with very different types of people. SEO’s are the folks in between. In my mind, the reason SEO goes well beyond just search marketing into most areas of business is because search engine marketing IMPACTS many of the decisions that are made in a business. Marketing, infrastructure, customer relations, analytics, accounting, human resources can all directly impact search marketing and vice versa. SEO has become more and more of a strategic vision as top rankings become more competitive, and more valuable. SEO is in large part the communication gap between marketing and IT, combined with top level executive strategy (The only good SEO’s that leave the field at this point, do so to become CEO’s – visual illustration).

This is intended to be an "advanced beginner’s guide" – which is a bit of a paradox, but the idea is that even the most proficient of SEO’s often revisit the basics, and that execution on simple solutions can be very elegant and effective. It will also help to cover many of the things that all too often get overlooked. Executing on basics is the most advanced play in the search engine marketing game. A little secret I’ll let you in on – Even the "SEO Pros" go back to basics – content and links. They’re only pros because these two critical elements have become second nature, and nearly every waking thought is based around how to create mo’ betta content, or get some new links in creative ways.

Even if you understand every single technique available – no matter what play you call – you still have to block and tackle to reach the endzone and score your top rankings. The most proficient SEO’s realize that search ranking, branding, marketing strategy, conversions, and postive conversations consist of two major elements – CONTENT and LINKS.

Content

User Experience and content organization

The user experience should be concise, and simple. Simple is elegant. You can have multitudes of functionality locked within a extremely simple streamlined interface. Read Don’t make me think, and the Big Red Fez.

Key tips with site architecture:

1. User architecture and bot architecture don’t need to be identical. A bot will determine the heirarchy of a site through it’s link structure. A user will determine the heirarchy of a site through the placement of the main navigational elements.

2. Search engines are becoming extremely proficient at incorporating semantics into link structure. Keeping a site sectioned into themes is extremely important. The importance of internal anchor text to this factor is rarely over-rated.

3. Internal search is incredible for gathering data on your site.

Resources for understanding information architecture, and balancing the user experience with the bot experience:

Content Creation

Keyword based content

Creating content specifically to rank for keywords. This is a borderline practice, depending on the intelligence level of the content. A thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters could lookup and change content based on a set of words.

User generated content

The beauty of web 2.0 – people decide to connect together to do something. Whether it’s worthwhile or otherwise, two heads are very often better than one, and conversation is the backbone of the web.

How to content

Everyone loves to know how to do something. I really wish I could download things like "how to do your own plumbing", and be able to figure it out. Someday, perhaps a well optimized and informative video will be able to do that.**

LINKS

The "Bot Experience"

"Create a site with your users in mind" has become an oft-quoted mantra of search engine representives when asked about how to rank better in search engines. While the logic is sound, it is also somewhat incomplete. The "experience" that a bot has when visiting your site will often determine the initial experience that a user has with your site as well. Controlling where the bot enters the site, and how the bot "sees" the site is of paramount importance to determining how users will find and navigate through your site.

Information architecture is one of the most overlooked areas of good search marketing. Mainly because it is one of the most difficult areas to retrofit on a site, and it’s extremely difficult for consultants to demonstrate the value to justify the workload needed to overhaul a site.

Link Development

Old is good – Old sites are trusted. Trustrank is a part of the game, and if you don’t believe it you’ve been sleeping. There is no sandbox, there is only the trustbox, and the trustbox emphasizes old, aged links that are on trusted domains that are relevant to your targeted query.

Link equity is the new brand building. Perhaps I’m a bit wrong – link equity, strategy, and development is the new brand building. Brand building and link building should coexist peacefully. Those folks out there that you’re paying $10 – $20 per hour for link building, are building your brand for the future. Why? because a brand is only a google search away these days. If I want to know how strong McDonald’s brand is – I do a google search. Perhaps I’m ahead of the curve, but even Joe sixpack isn’t that far behind me. He knows that google is a verb, and he’ll soon figure out how to change his default search application from windows live to yahoo or google. New brands don’t underestimate the intelligence of their consumers. Default search doens’t "WOW" anyone. Relevance, and information quality does.

Welcome to the Rabbit Hole Alice – Resources for those figuring out what SEO really is.

You can take the blue pill or the red pill. The blue pill will take you back to your cozy desk job coding for the man, and the red pill might lead you to insomnia induced by ideas of how to turn your startup into a real company using only your laptop combined with some technical and marketing skills, and a realistic gameplan to pull it off. Or you might end up going from self employed to unemployed real quickly.

The first converstation I have with folks generally consists of them asking some questions about what SEO is. If they are REALLY interested, and get beyond thinking about the fact that I tell them meta tags generally don’t matter much, I would guess it feels a bit like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. I am still overwhelmed with information overload on a daily basis, and this is after over about 6 years of studying and experimenting with SEO techniques on a daily basis. I think the information overload stems from having so many opportunities to apply the information, as well as trying to keep up and evolve process with emerging opportunities. Digesting, managing, and even thriving on the information overload is extremely important in a business built on timely, relevant information.

Here’s where to start with your SEO Training if you’d prefer the red pill:

Practice your blocking and tackling every day. Read these long enough, focus on refining tactics, and experimentation, and you’ll always have a team to play for; your clients, vendors, employer, or partners will be dumping the gatorade all over you for being the one that "made it rain".

What resources do you use for your SEO Playbook or your SEO blocking and tackling?

Seattle-based start-up Pluggd was founded in February 2006 with the goal of making it easier for people to discover, experience, and share online audio and video programming, which is more commonly known as podcasting.

According to the creators, the website “is an aggregation of both traditional media and independent online-only producers.” The site’s search results are based on topics of interest, popularity, and critical acclaim.

But what, you might ask, sets this start-up apart from the plethora of other audio and visual search choices? The answer lies in the unique search result features of the site, including heat mapping and the ability to choose the exact point of the audio or visual result you would like.

The heat-mapping feature allows users to search for a particular point in the broadcast of a recording or visual image that is most closely related to the original search topic.

For example, if a user were to search ESPN radio for “University of Kentucky basketball”, Pluggd would show the user on the heat map display the “hottest” place of interest in the color orange.

Pluggd even locates related topics in a broadcast, for example the term “bowl game”. A user listening to a broadcast about UK football could find the exact point in an ESPN broadcast where the team’s bowl game site would be mentioned.

Competing podcast sites, such as Podzinger, do not offer such relevant features as heat mapping. The lack of such a convenient feature could mean decreased traffic for the competing sites in the future.

Intel, who have their own audio and visual feature, made the largest donation. Intel, as well as other investors, seems to believe that Pluggd is a superior product, investing $1.65 million in the start-up.

Some other generous investors besides Intel include:

-Paul Maritz, former Microsoft group vice president of systems and applications
-Scott Oki, former senior vice president for sales, marketing and service at Microsoft
-Brian Magierski, CEO of Kalivo, former co-founder/CEO of iMark (acquired by Ariba);
-Fraser Black, technology investor
-Bill Bryant, founder and investor in numerous search-focused startups including Netbot, Medio and Singingfish;
-Alex Alben, former executive at Starwave and RealNetworks;
-Barry Newman, venture partner at NeoCarta, former vice chairman of the technology group at Bear Stearns;
-Mark Klebanoff, former chief financial officer at RealNetworks.

If you are interested in using the unique features of the search site, the download is available at Pluggd’s demo site.

Autmn Davis is a staff writer for WebProNews covering ebusiness and technology.

]]>http://www.webpronews.com/perfected-pluggd-podcast-search-2006-12/feed0ASP.NET: Is it too Difficult?http://www.webpronews.com/aspnet-is-it-too-difficult-2006-11
http://www.webpronews.com/aspnet-is-it-too-difficult-2006-11#commentsTue, 21 Nov 2006 21:49:49 +0000http://www.webpronews.com/?p=33081]]>There is no doubt in my mind, that ASP.NET is the most powerful and versatile platform for web applications at the moment.

By leveraging the .NET Framework you can do absolutely anything in no time, but is that power also the problem with ASP.NET?

In the dark ages before ASP.NET, we were stuck with ASP and PHP but we were just as enthusiastic about them as we are with ASP.NET now.

They were relative easy to learn and to learn well enough to do something really cool with in a short period of time.

That made them accessible to almost anyone with just a will to learn and in my opinion that’s what made the web what it is today.

ASP.NET changed all that.

The power and scale of it was so immense that it could take years to be familiar with just the page life cycle or the basic classes in the CLR and even longer to be able to take full advantage of the entire platform.

After almost 5 years I still find classes and methods I didn’t know existed.

That makes ASP.NET much more difficult to learn and master than ASP and PHP.

Mads Kristensen currently works as a Senior Developer at Traceworks located
in Copenhagen, Denmark. Mads graduated from Copenhagen Technical Academy with a multimedia degree in
2003, but has been a professional developer since 2000. His main focus is on ASP.NET but is responsible for Winforms, Windows- and
web services in his daily work as well. A true .NET developer with great passion for the simple solution.

http://www.madskristensen.dk/

]]>http://www.webpronews.com/aspnet-is-it-too-difficult-2006-11/feed1Flickr and Delicious Usability Reviewhttp://www.webpronews.com/flickr-and-delicious-usability-review-2006-11
http://www.webpronews.com/flickr-and-delicious-usability-review-2006-11#commentsFri, 17 Nov 2006 14:17:47 +0000http://www.webpronews.com/?p=32970visual usability review (in the style of the recent Windows Live Mail review). He starts off his post with:
]]>Balakumar does a visual usability review (in the style of the recent Windows Live Mail review). He starts off his post with:

Hello Yahoo!,

I am one of the regular user and lover of Flickr and Del.icio.us services. Whenever I am working of these web applications, I used to feel the need of some simple changes in them.

]]>http://www.webpronews.com/flickr-and-delicious-usability-review-2006-11/feed0Value Systemshttp://www.webpronews.com/value-systems-2006-11
http://www.webpronews.com/value-systems-2006-11#commentsTue, 14 Nov 2006 14:04:33 +0000http://www.webpronews.com/?p=32833On the web there is a meshing of a virtually unlimited number of value systems.

If you can find ways to remove market friction or create things that will be relevant to many different value systems you stand to generate great profits. Search + advertising is one way to leverage others work into a value system of some sorts, but search is still in its infancy. That is why visual search is new and Google is trying so hard to shore up their other revenue streams.

Money only has value because people push it hard and powerful organizations standardize it and require it to pay taxes. Value only exists in your mind. At the root of all value systems is a marketer and a belief.

Hiring managers said the following information discovered on the Web helped to confirm their decision to hire a candidate:

64% – candidate’s background information supported their professional qualifications for the job

40% – candidate was well-rounded, showed a wide range of interests

34% – candidate had great communication skills

31% – candidate’s site conveyed a professional image

31% – got a good feel for the candidate’s personality, could see a good fit within the company culture

23% – other people posted great references about the candidate

23% – candidate was creative

19% – candidate received awards and accolades

I often find myself Googling (for employee, business or general research reasons) e-mail addresses, names, businesses. That’s the case for other employers too. Most of them search your name in the search engines, trying to find online references and discussions, simply because they know how to do it and because they found that this works brilliantly to their advantage. Those online references make his decision about you easier and shed some impartial light on his opinion about you (other than your interview or CV references).

So be careful what you write on the Internet. If your CV states perfect C# programming skills (or Expert Search Marketing Consultant) and your employer finds you on the Internet asking how to install Visual Studio (or how to search inbound links in Google) or swearing and harassing people for no reason (like I do, but at least with solid reasons) that won’t be in your best advantage right ?

Cristian Mezei is the Founder of Infomarket Network, a web marketing agency
based in Bucharest, specializing in search marketing, social media and usability/accesibility. Cristian shares some of his views in Seopedia, his personal blog.

]]>http://www.webpronews.com/be-careful-when-writing-online-2006-10/feed0Visual Studio 2005 – Publishing Web Sitehttp://www.webpronews.com/visual-studio-publishing-web-site-2006-10
http://www.webpronews.com/visual-studio-publishing-web-site-2006-10#commentsFri, 13 Oct 2006 19:17:28 +0000http://www.webpronews.com/?p=32068What’s the purpose of site precompilation? As it turns out, improved performance is often brought as an evidence of the benefits of precompilation.

While precompilation certainly saves users from the notorious first-hit delay, I don’t believe that this simple fact, which affects only one user per page, is going to change users’ feelings about the overall usability of the site.

Precompilation is mostly a safety measure: using precompilation makes your application safer because when you deploy it you know that all pages compile without errors. In addition, your precompiled application is safer because any valuable source code is out of reach.

To get both benefits you must opt for deploy precompilation. This form of precompilation creates a read-only image of the site that might be packaged to MSI or ZIP files as well as directly x-copied to the web server machine.

For web sites that are subject to frequent page updates, updateable deploy precompilation is probably better because updateable precompilation allows you to edit and add new pages. These new pages will be compiled on first hit, though.

If you leave the Allow this precompiled site to be updatable checkbox checked, markup inside of your Webforms and user controls will not be pre-compiled into a DLL allowing you to make changes after deployment. If you would prefer to lock down the markup so that changes to the deployed content are not allowed, uncheck this box.

The Use fixed naming and single page assemblies checkbox allows you to disable batch compilation so that each page is compiled into a fixed-named assembly. Leaving this box unchecked allows you to take advantage of batch compilation.

]]>http://www.webpronews.com/visual-studio-publishing-web-site-2006-10/feed0Squash Bugs In Visual Studiohttp://www.webpronews.com/squash-bugs-in-visual-studio-2006-09
http://www.webpronews.com/squash-bugs-in-visual-studio-2006-09#commentsThu, 21 Sep 2006 18:56:51 +0000http://www.webpronews.com/?p=31630When something odd happens in a program that the developer certainly did not include in the code, a bug may have nestled in, and needs to be tracked down and fixed.

There is nothing quite like firing up a new program and watching it return something to standard output that looks more like a cat walked across a Cyrillic keyboard than the results one expected to see.

Developers working in Microsoft’s Visual Studio can take steps to help avoid the pain of invoking the debugger yet again, by proactively preventing some of the more common bugs from cropping up in code.

Author Peter Aitken has worked on several programming related books, including ones about Visual Studio.

He recently posted some commentary to InformIT that aims at placing the virtual flyswatter in developers’ hands and turning them loose on those bugs.

Even the most dedicated programmer who follows Aitken’s suggestions on good programming practices might still end up having to track down a belligerent byte or two of buggy code.

Just like the well-known maxim ‘divide and conquer’, breaking up one’s code can help a programmer narrow down the section where the bug lives.

Aitken suggests using breakpoints to find that critter.

“While the program is paused, you can take various actions to help find a bug,” he wrote.

Those actions include modifying the conditions that trigger the breakpoint, or specifying a hit count for each time the breakpoint is passed.

Once the program pauses, it’s time for the sheer joy of single-stepping through the code.

Aitken pointed out some useful keyboard shortcuts for when the program enters break mode. The developer can continue to the next breakpoint, or step into, over, or out of running the next statement.

Sometimes seeing the value of variables can help identify the problem.

By setting watch expressions for program variables through the Debug menu will show those values as the program executes.

If a variable reaches an unexpected value, that would indicate some kind of issue impacting it.